After reporting from Iraq for two years as NPR’s Baghdad Bureau Chief, Jamie Tarabay is now embarking on a two year project reporting on America’s Muslims. The coverage will take in the country’s approx 6 million Muslims, of different ethnic, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, and the issues facing their daily lives as Americans.

In January 2007, Tarabay was part of the NPR News team that won the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of Iraq, the only news organization so recognized.

For the past nine years, Tarabay has been a foreign correspondent covering — and living in — some of the world’s highest-profile regions of conflict. In September 2000, she arrived in Jerusalem as a correspondent for the AP just days before the second intifada broke out. She captured her three years of reporting on Palestinians and Israelis in her first book A Crazy Occupation: Eyewitness to the Intifada which was published in Australia in 2005 by Allen and Unwin. It is now available in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.

Tarabay is one of the few female Western journalists to have made a career as a war reporter. In that time she’s been arrested, proposed to by militiamen, interviewed everyone from world leaders to armed fighters, been shot at, felt the blast of an IED and the punches of demonstrators as well as police.

Australian by birth, and Lebanese by heritage, Tarabay grew up in Sydney, Berlin and Beirut. She has a BA in Government and French from the University of Sydney and can speak Arabic and French. She lives with her husband in Baltimore, MD.